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When he gets out of class, he has voice mail: Ginevra's at home, no one else is around, so he should just Apparate there when he's done.

She's given him permission to Apparate straight into her room, and he's done it a few times very late at night rather than risk waking up Xander and Spike, but he still doesn't like to: Certain social niceties, he thinks, exist for a reason. In this case he compromises: He goes to the bottom of the stairs, then walks up so that she can hear him, so that she's not startled.

"Come in," she says, sounding slightly distracted, when he knocks on her door.

He does, and leans down to kiss her. She returns it, more forcefully than he might have expected—then gets distracted again.

He glances over at the television and sees why.

"Good Lord, Ginevra, what are you watching?"

"Faith lent it to me. She said it would be...enlightening." She doesn't sound at all embarrassed, just a little breathless. "Sit down," she adds.

He leaves messenger bag, hoodie, and shoes on the floor, then sits down next to her on the bed. "Dare I ask how in the world you and Faith got on this topic?" It's the one thing he still hasn't told her—he's told her about everyone else he's been with (an admittedly brief list), he's told her that he's been with men, he's told her about Carlo, he's told her about the time he and Jessica peed on each other, for God's sake (Ginevra had been both amused and horrified, which had been more or less Sam's and Jessica's reactions at the time), but he still doesn't know how to say that, once, a number of years ago, in Cleveland, with Dean quickly losing his memory and no remedy in sight, Sam, desperate and terrified and wanting any comfort he could get, slept with Faith.

Ginevra explains, "She and Hermione and I all had a bit to drink"—another frightening thought—"and were talking about...things. And Faith asked if we had done this, and I had to admit it was something I'd never even thought of, though Hermione—well, never mind. Anyway, Faith said I should watch this if I was curious."

"And what do you think so far?"

She pauses the movie, looks at him. "I'd like to try it. I mean, I know it's rather strange, but all these people seem to be having a good time, and Faith and Hermione said—"

Sam holds up his hand. "Faith I can deal with. But bringing Hermione into the discussion means that we're talking about my brother, and I don't think my brain can recover from that level of trauma."

Ginevra laughs, but her eyes are more serious than her face. "You don't think it's too strange?"

"I thought you'd never ask, is what I think."

"Well," she says, and snuggles into his lap. "Let's watch the rest of it. Or shall I start again from the beginning?"

"No, from here is fine," Sam says, and admits, "I've seen it before."

She turns to look at him, raises an eyebrow. "So you've done this. With a girl, I mean."

It had never been Jessica's favorite thing, but she would do it if he asked, which he had a few times. "Not all that often, and it's been a long time, but yes, I have."

"And it feels good?"

He wraps his arms around her, kisses the tendon in her neck. "It feels incredible."

She starts the DVD player again, and they watch the rest of it. The video is short, only about a hour, and Ginevra was halfway through when Sam showed up. He's seen this a few times—one of the women on his hall junior year was a peer sex education counselor, and had a porn collection that rivalled Dean's for raunch, though of course Dean's didn't include Bend Over Boyfriend or The Elegant Spanking (which was where Sam and Jessica had gotten the idea for the water sports). So his attention wanders a little, and he lets his hands wander, too: across Ginevra's belly, over her thighs, up to trace lightly over her breasts. He undoes the first four buttons on her shirt and slips his hands inside, where his fingers are warm on her skin. Underneath her bra, her nipples are hard, and he wishes he could take one in his mouth, but the angle's wrong. He settles for playing her areolae between his fingers, pressing kisses to her throat and the nape of her neck.

"Sam...what...you're not watching the film."

"I've already seen it."

"I haven't!"

"You can't concentrate on more than one thing at once?"

"Not when you're doing that!"

So he backs off, watches with her, restrains himself to gentle brushes across the soft skin of her stomach and hips. He can feel, then, rather than hear her breath quicken when they get near the end, when the beautiful, curvaceous woman onscreen slicks up her silicone penis and slides it into her male lover's ass. The man is stretched out on his stomach, a pillow under his hips, and he moans, arching to meet her as she pushes sinuously, sensuously into him.

Man and woman come nearly simultaneously; Sam watches the shudders traverse the woman's back as she climaxes, as she keeps thrusting until the man comes, too, crying out helplessly and clutching at the sheets of the huge bed.

Sam presses stop, and now he can hear Ginevra's breathing. He moves his hand between her legs, enough to insinuate itself against the denim and tell her wordlessly what he'd like to do, but not enough for any real pressure. "Do it, Sam," she says, and he reaches around with his other hand and unbuttons her jeans.

She's wet and slick beneath the cotton, and he teases her for a few moments, enjoying her soft gasps. "So that's what you want to do to me?" he says, low.

"Only if—yes—yes—if you want me to."

"I want you to," he says. "Would you put me on my stomach like that?"

"I'd—oh, Sam—bend you over. Make you spread your legs a little."

"I think I'm too tall for that to work."

"So I'll stand on a chair," she says defiantly. "You'll bend over for me, and I'll stand behind you—maybe spank you first."

"Maybe?"

"If you ask nicely—oh, like that!"

She comes in a rush of wetness; he twists forward to kiss her, drinking the noises from her mouth. He kisses her until the aftershocks have finished sparking through her body, and then he pulls back to lick his fingers.

The next day, they go shopping for the equipment they'll need.

The shop isn't far from Abyssus, sandwiched into a storefront between two equally sandwiched storefronts on the ground floor of one of the old tenements. The front is now all glass, with heavy velvet curtains draped across the inside, giving the illusion of space but also of privacy.

Inside could be the interior of an upscale clothing boutique: The lighting is gentle, there are lamps in sconces, and the carpet is plush beneath their shoes. Of course, the large table front and center that displays a vast and quite colorful selection of dildoes allows for no doubt regarding what this store sells. There are other customers scattered around the store, some alone, some in pairs, some in groups of three or even four. There's a twosome having a conversation about masturbation that Sam is doing his best not to listen to: He doesn't need to know the details about clitoral stimulation of anyone's girlfriend but his own.

A woman behind the counter—about Hermione's height, solid, with Dean's haircut—looks up. For all that her smile betrays, they might have just walked into the Gap to look at sweaters. "Hey, guys. Can I help you with anything?"

Sam's about to decline, and just find what they need. It's not exactly arcane lore, and you don't live near San Francisco for three years without wandering into the occasional sex shop (and between Jess and Carlo, Sam found himself wandering into more than one). Ginevra, however, whips out something she must have printed from the computer. "Yes, please. We're looking for an item such as this."

The saleswoman looks at it and nods. "Sure. You're going to be the one wearing the harness?"

"That's right."

Ginevra's not blushing; truly, she might be looking for nothing more than a sweater at the Gap.

"Alright," the saleswoman says. "Have you ever used one before?"

Ginevra shakes her head.

"Then I'd probably recommend this." The saleswoman pulls a box from a shelf. "It's microfiber, which I know isn't as sexy as leather, but the fastenings are a lot simpler than the leather and PVC ones we carry, and honestly, when you're in the middle of it, you don't want to have to stop and figure out all the logistics, you know?" She puts the box onto the counter, then leads them over to the table arrayed with the astonishing variety of dildoes. "Next question. Realistic or nonrepresentational?"

Ginevra—without seeming to realize it—glances down at herself, as though picturing what the various examples might look like there. Sam thinks back, tries to remember what Jess used—he's pretty sure it didn't resemble the real thing except insofar as its basic shape. If he recalls correctly, it was green. And kind of sparkly.

It's going in his ass, so he makes an executive decision and says, "Nonrepresentational. But not, um, green and sparkly or anything."

Ginevra appears to be swallowing a smile.

The saleswoman picks one up off the table and hands it to him. He's not sure about the etiquette here, so he takes it from her hand as though it's any other object. It's purple, slender, about five inches long. Not sparkly.

It looks about right—but, he thinks, it might be good to go smaller; he hasn't had anal sex of any kind in years, and this is probably going to take some getting used to. He finds the toy's slightly smaller twin on the table and says, "This is good."

"Sam, are you mad?" Ginevra says. "That's tiny."

"It's four and a quarter inches," says the saleswoman.

Ginevra takes it from him, and Sam doesn't need a Seer's abilities to know, sinkingly and horrifyingly, where this is going. "Samuel, you're twice this size. This? It would get lost."

Sam would like to die.

The saleswoman rubs her mouth, and Sam sees her shoulders shake before she brings them under professional control. "Ma'am," the saleswoman says, "I can only assume that you're a very fortunate woman."

Ginevra's smile is sudden and blinding. "I think so, yes." There's no double entendre in her voice.

"The average guy is only about five, five and a half inches—depending on which study you look at—when erect," the saleswoman tells her. "So this is shorter than average, but not by a whole lot."

Ginevra holds the dildo up and looks at it in disbelief. "So only about this much longer—" She gestures with her finger about an inch past the toy's tip.

"Right," says the saleswoman.

"But that's...that's terrible," Ginevra says. "No wonder your shop does such tremendous business."

At that, the saleswoman does burst out laughing; Sam can feel himself blushing. "Like I said," the saleswoman tells Ginevra, "you—both of you—must be very fortunate. Now, did you want to go with the four-and-a-quarter? Or did you want to go up?"

"No," says Sam. He hopes he'll be forgiven for not making eye contact right now. "The smaller one, please."

"I think that's smart, for just getting started. You'll want some decent lube, too. Let me show you what we have."

They're done about ten minutes later, and once they're back out on the street, Sam says, "I may decide to speak to you again sometime this century." He puts his arm around her, though, so she'll know he doesn't mean it.

"I didn't mean to embarrass you," she says, sounding less contrite than surprised.

"At least it was complimentary."

"But that can't be true, what the woman said. That's average?"

Sam tries to think of a tactful way to put this, and can't. "Ginevra, your experience isn't exactly...extensive."

"Well, no," she says, sounding slightly miffed. "I'm not a slag."

"Of course not." He vaguely wants to hit his head a couple of times against the wall of one of the buildings they're passing. "But you've been with one guy—me—and I'm...um, a little bit bigger than average. Taller than most people and, uh, other things too."

"So she was right?"

"That's the statistic I've heard."

"Well," says Ginevra, "as I said, it's no wonder that shop is so successful."

He leans down and kisses the top of her head, thinking that she's frequently lacking in tact, and often he can't figure out where she gets her crazy notions from (though this one, he has to admit, is supported by her own empirical evidence, however limited it may be), and there's not a thing he would change about her.

Ginevra has Quidditch practice that night; he has an early class the next morning, so he's asleep by the time she gets back. Then he has a paper to write, and lives on nothing but coffee, orange juice, York peppermint patties, and Renaissance legal theory for a day and a half. (Faith squawks and tries to feed him broccoli, he swears at her in Latin, and she swears back in Bostonese.) He hands in the paper and promptly gets sick; then Ginevra has to go to New Hampshire for four days to help the local authorities weed out a throwback group of Voldemort followers.

What with one thing and another, it's a couple of weeks before they get any kind of substantial time together, much less alone.

When it happens, they're in her room at Spike's. Sam wakes up to sunlight through the windows, but the clear day is deceptive: The high isn't expected to get up past twenty degrees. He's on his stomach and Ginevra's sprawled over him, her head between his shoulder blades, which seems to have become its appointed place. They're warm, her thick comforter tucked around them, its bright Ikea blues and reds a cheerful contrast to the antique Mission furniture that Spike had arranged in this room. Spike offered to put it in storage when Ginevra moved in, so that she could choose her own things, but she told him happily that she utterly lacks that sort of taste, and she liked the room as it was and promised not to break anything.

So they've had to be careful with the slats in the headboard.

Sam lets himself awaken slowly, content in the winter sun filtered through the lead glass, listening to Ginevra's slow breaths as she sleeps. This is all something he never thought he'd have, a second chance at everything: his classes at Columbia (yes, it's annoying that he has to do everything over, but he'd rather do it over than not be able to do it at all), his place in a family and a group of friends, his brother safe and happy, and of course Ginevra, who belongs to herself more than she belongs to him, but he likes to think of her as his, and of himself as hers.

He can feel it when she starts to wake up: Her arms settle around him, and she makes the noise that signifies "I'm not verbal yet, but I'll get there at some point." He turns over, dislodging her as gently as possible, and arranges her against his chest. She fits her head underneath his chin, and he strokes her hair. It's getting long (long again, she said when he observed this a couple of weeks ago, and he knows it's true—has seen the pictures of Ginevra back when she was long-haired Ginny—but he has known her only as Ginevra, with hair that is just now past her shoulders).

"Time's it?" she mumbles after a while.

"A little past ten."

"We don't have to be anywhere?"

"It's Saturday. You don't have work, I don't have class, and I'm off from the bookstore and the library today." Most of his work hours are at Butler, Columbia's prodigiously becolumned main library, renowned for its nearly ten-million-strong collection, its twenty-four-hour staffing, and the frequent sexual escapades in its stacks (Sam has no comment on whether he and Ginevra may have been participants). His wages from Columbia are part of of his financial aid package, along with some grants and no small amount of loans; but he genuinely enjoys working at the bookstore, and after all this time, he knows the customers, they know him, and Barkley, the shop's cantankerous calico, has finally deigned to grace his lap with her presence. He's not there as much as he used to be, though, and, knowing that Ginevra would be home today, he gave his shift to a grad-student coworker who was trying to pick up some extra hours.

And now he has an entire day with nothing planned. He wonders whether it will be possible to convince Ginevra to spend it in bed.

"Nothing we have to do?" she confirms.

"Nothing at all."

"Don't let's get out of bed," she says decisively, and he laughs. No convincing needed, apparently.

The first time is sleepy morning sex, Sam on top because Ginevra can't be bothered. She's smiling when she comes, and she wraps her arms around his shoulders after, as he breathes into the deliciously sweaty skin of her neck. He settles himself more comfortably and is ready to go back to sleep, but she elbows him and says, "Waffles."

"Sleep," he counters, but he knows she'll win. Unless it's late at night and they're on their way to sleep anyway, she almost always gets hungry after sex.

"Food," she says, and slaps him lightly on the ass.

"Not unless you mean it," he teases, and mouthes at the delicate spot under her jaw.

She shivers. "Oh, you have no idea how much I mean it. But not until after I've had some tea and something to eat."

"Promises, promises," he says.

"Food," she repeats, and he knows when he's lost.

Downstairs is quiet and empty: Xander could be a number of places, among them Faith's, or even Abyssus—he'll sometimes go over early in the day, to take inventory and do the books when there's no one around to bother him. And Spike must either be still asleep, or otherwise holed up away from the sun—with or without Veronica, is anyone's guess.

Sam makes waffles, Ginevra makes tea, and they eat at the kitchen table—at least until Ginevra decides that she's had enough, and she finishes her tea and climbs into Sam's lap.

He kisses her, then moves her so that she's sitting on his left thigh. He keeps eating. If he can't have his postcoital nap, he can at least finish his breakfast.

"Your girlfriend is on your lap," she complains, "eagerly inviting you to shag her, and you're eating waffles?"

"I'm hungry," he informs her, and takes another bite.

"You are the most annoying person ever to walk the earth."

"You denied me my nap," he says. "You can at least let me have my waffles."

"I'm never having sex with you again," she tells him.

He raises an eyebrow, and eats more waffle, and drinks some tea. It always tastes better when she makes it.

She rolls her eyes, then reaches across the table for her fork and begins eating off his plate.

"Cheater," he says.

"Wanker," she replies.

"Not necessary today." He takes one last bite and leaves the rest for her.

Upstairs, they take off the clothing they put on perfunctorily to go downstairs, and they stretch out against each other in bed. Sunlight is still streaming through the windows, gleaming off Ginevra's hair. Sam runs his hand down her body, appreciating the softness of curves and the definition of muscle underneath them. He rolls her onto her back and spends some time sucking on her nipples—they're amazingly sensitive, and she's even come from this a couple of times. She wraps a leg around his thighs, pulls her in closer towards her, sighs his name. He lets his lips move down, slowly, leaving kisses to her ribcage, her navel, the insides of her thighs, the delicate crease of skin between hip and leg. When he licks a careful line from vagina to clitoris, her moan is long and low, and her fingers find his hair.

He does it for a while, enjoying her taste, her smell, her sounds. He brings her close and then backs off—she pants, "You bastard!" and he laughs.

"Nap," he reminds her.

"I hate you."

He laughs and returns to his appointed task. This time he doesn't stop, and she comes in waves around him. He touches her through the aftershocks (and she comes a second time, against his fingers) and then he gathers her up when she collapses, limp, back onto the bed.

"Do you still hate me?" he asks, brushing her disheveled hair back from her face.

"Not as much," she says.

Once she's had a couple of minutes to recover, her hands begin to explore him: his chest, his stomach, the cuts of his hips. He's noticeably hard, and when he tries to arch into her hand, she pushes him gently but firmly back down—that strength that you wouldn't think she's got, and yet she does, unquestionably.

She props her head on her hand; keeps her fingers on their light, teasing trajectory; looks down at him thoughtfully. "I haven't decided what I'd like to do with you."

"What are the options?"

"So very many. But it strikes me that we have an item we haven't used yet."

Immediately, he's even harder.

She keeps up her lazy exploration, leans down and they kiss. He reaches to touch again—her breasts are the precisely correct size and shape for his hands, how can he be expected not to? But she has other ideas, and pins his wrists to the bed. He pulls at her grip, mainly to see whether she's serious—she is.

"So impatient," she says. "You just can't keep those hands to yourself. Do I need to tie them?"

"No." He wants to touch her, and though sometimes he enjoys having control taken—literally—out of his hands, he'll go nuts if they do this today.

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

"Are you quite sure?"

"Test me."

She laughs. "Oh, I plan to. Turn over."

He hedges; she says, "Are you deliberately provoking me?"

"That depends," he tells her. "What happens if I do?"

"Turn over and find out," she suggests.

He does.

She spanks him for a while. It's delicious, and it stings just enough, and he gasps and clutches at the sheets and tries not to come. She uses her hand at first, but when he chokes out, "Harder," she pauses in thought, and then he hears a murmured "Accio."

She uses her hairbrush after that.

His normal tolerance for pain is high—and as turned on as he is right now, endorphins and arousal flooding his bloodstream and nerve endings, it's even higher than usual. Still, this goes to the edge of what he can take—her brush is old-fashioned, flat-backed and made of beechwood, and each stroke is intense, the sensation explosive and red-tinged. His body's not sure whether to jerk away from or arch into it, and his brain's not sure whether to ask her to stop or plead for more.

He pleads for more.

She stops, though, and he hears her set the brush on the nightstand. His ass feels like it's on fire. The palm of her hand is cool against the battered skin, and she rubs gently, soothing. She kisses the back of his neck, strokes his hair. "Did you come?" she asks.

"N-no," he says, shaking his head. He's surprised he's able to talk.

"Why not?"

He assembles the words, though his voice is shaky. "I don't want to come until you fuck me."

"Good," she says. "That's what I want, too." Still tender, she kisses his hair, and he recognizes himself in the gesture, nonverbal reassurance, from the times he was with Jessica like this, the very few times he's done this with Ginevra. (In general he shies away from it with her: After what happened with that asshole in England, he doesn't want to give even the illusion that she might not be in control of the situation.)

She starts with her fingers, small but skillful. They've never tried her whole hand, but he thinks that one of these days he'd like to. She keeps kissing him—his back, his shoulders, the nape of his neck—as her fingers go in and out, slowly, and he hears himself panting as they rub up against the pleasure center inside. They're warm, slick, and he arches his hips up to meet them. She laughs, kisses him again. "You're such a tart for my fingers. Look at you, stretched out and desperate for them."

"You're one to talk—God!—the way you sound when I go down on you."

A third finger, and he shudders around them. "Yes," she says serenely, "but you're not going down on me right now, then, are you?"

She goes faster, harder, and his world narrows to where his girlfriend—smaller than he is by somewhere in the neighborhood of fourteen inches and a hundred pounds—is calmly fucking him with her tiny fingers, her movements precise, controlled, and unmaking him from the inside. "Ginevra, please," he says. "I want..."

"You want what?"

He looks back at her. "I want your cock."

She leans forward and kisses him—it's a little awkward, since he's lying on his stomach. "What a coincidence," she says. "So do I."

She Summons the dildo and harness from where they're lying on the dresser. He kneels in front of her and carefully fastens the bands around her hips and thighs. When it's done, she looks down at him, runs her hands through his hair, and he takes the silicone into his mouth.

"What are you doing?" she asks. It's almost a whisper.

He pulls back, looks up at her through his eyelashes. "Sucking your cock," he tells her.

When he puts his mouth back on it, she moans as though it's her own skin under his tongue.

He can't quite get around the straps, but he does manage to push a thumb under there to rub her clit. She cries out when he does, and her fingers tighten in his hair. He sucks on the dildo like it's her own small penis, touches the softness of her flesh beneath it, and it doesn't take much until she's shuddering in orgasm, secret places hot and thunderstorm-wet around his fingertips.

When she recovers, she tilts his head back and looks down at him. "I want to fuck you now," she says. "I want to fuck you until you're out of your mind with it. I want you to beg me to let you come, and then maybe I will or maybe I won't, depending on how you behave."

He licks a slow stripe down the dildo, the way he would if he were teasing a man. "And how am I behaving so far?"

"You're saucy, but I don't believe I need to spank you again."

"Good," he says, "because that *hurt*."

She laughs, breaking character, and he stands up. He leans down to suck on her earlobe, lay a line of kisses from her jaw to her shoulder, then reaches over to the nightstand, where she left the lubricant. He warms some on his fingers and then smoothes it over the firm silicone. He does it slowly, rhythmically, the way he'd do it to himself lying in bed with his own hand and nothing but time to stroke, tease, draw it out as long as he can until he's whimpering, gasping under his own touch.

He cradles Ginevra's head in his left hand and kisses her deep and deliberate, following the rhythm his right has set. "I'm jerking you off," he tells her. "Long and slow, like I'd do it to myself, like you do it to me when you want to keep me on the edge until I'm desperate to come." She's rocking forward into his grip, and he whispers, "Does it feel good?"

"Feels incredible," she says. "I could let you do this until I spill all over your fingers, make you lick up my come."

He kisses her harder, rubs some more lubricant over the dildo. "How do you want me?"

"Lie back down on the bed. On your stomach. Put a pillow under your hips. Maybe two."

He does, and then, after a moment, turns to look back at her. She's standing next to the bed, looking a little stunned, and he has to remind himself that she's never done this before—that there's a lot she hasn't done, that he has.

"You have to tell me if I hurt you," she says softly, without artifice. "I don't want to hurt you, Sam."

"I'm not worried. But I promise I'll tell you."

Her fingers again, and he pushes back against them. "Impatient," she says, sounding amused. "Don't fret. We'll get there."

He keeps fucking himself on her fingers as she opens him up, and when she takes them away, his moan of protest is nearly a plea. But a moment later he feels the blunt head of the dildo pressing against his asshole, and he gasps as she pushes inside.

The sensation is not unfamiliar, but it's been a while, and the feeling, though pleasurable, is undeniably invasive. She pauses, one hand gentle on the small of his back. "It's good," he says. "Keep going."

He feels himself stretching to let the silicone cock in, and it still feels good, but it burns a little bit, too. She pauses again, hands on his hips. She strokes him, almost petting, and he relaxes under her hands and around the toy.

"Fuck me," he tells her, and she does.

She pulls out slowly, partway, and then thrusts back in, does it again, and he cries out when the dildo hits his prostate. It's longer than her fingers, and thicker, and when she thrusts in again, this time with more force, he spreads his legs wider, takes her deeper. Her hips roll against his ass and thighs, and he turns his head to the side, panting, remembering why this feels as good as it does.

"Fuck me harder," he says. "God, Ginevra, please."

"It doesn't hurt?"

"No—oh fuck. No, not at all. Please."

She does it harder, faster, and he wishes he was in a different position—his cock is trapped between his body and the bedcovers, and the friction from their movement isn't enough, but he can't comfortably reach underneath to masturbate himself or ask her to do it.

"Ginevra," he says, "pull out for a second."

She does, her face an immediate wash of concern. "Is it not OK?"

He turns over and reaches up to lay his hand on her cheek. "It's more than OK," he reassures her. He keeps his hips on the pillow, lifts his legs to settle them around her waist. "But I want to be able to see you, and if I can't touch myself, I'll probably lose my mind."

She slicks more lubricant first on the dildo, then on him; looks mildly perplexed for a second; and then slides carefully back inside. "You can go harder than that," Sam says, tucking a stray strand of hair behind one of her ears. "I'm not going to break."

She kisses him, fast and almost bruising, and when she pulls back to look at him, she's grinning. "You want it hard? I'll give it to you hard."

She does.

It's like they're one organism, moving in ferocious synchronicity, and he jerks himself while she pushes in harder, faster every time.

"I love you," she says, low and breathless. "Love you, love fucking you, love watching you all spread out for me." She kisses him again, hard and possessive. "I know you want to come," she tells him. "So let me have it, Samuel. Let me see it."

He can't say no to that.

It's intense, starting deep and moving through his body as inexorably as an earthquake, painting both of them with hot streaks of white. His entire body arches up into it, his right hand urgent on his cock, his left clenched in the sheets. Some part of him knows that he's making noise, but he has no idea what the sounds might be—whether they're just incoherent moans, or her name.

He falls back, sprawling, pulling her down with him and wrapping his arms around her. Ginevra has different ideas, though. Carefully, she pulls out—eliciting another gasp—and then sits up on her knees to unfasten the harness's straps and drop it onto the floor. She lies back down, head in the crook of his shoulder, and he realizes she's touching herself.

"Let me," he says, and puts his hand over hers. They compromise and bring her off together, Sam's fingers touching but Ginevra's guiding, while he kisses her, slow and lazy. She moans into his mouth as she comes, and he holds her curled against him afterwards. "I love you, too," he tells her.

"I know," she says, smiling, certain, as indolent as a ginger cat lying in her patch of sun.